Toby Young

Toby Young

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

Toby Young

Yvette Cooper wants to lock up your sons

In his independent review of the Prevent programme last year, Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong with Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy. Instead of focusing on Islamism, Prevent was wasting its time investigating complaints of ‘far-right’ extremism from left-wing teachers, e.g. 14-year-old boys ‘caught’ watching TikTok videos of Nigel Farage. He has pointed

Fraser Nelson, Cindy Yu, Mary Wakefield, Anthony Sattin, and Toby Young

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Fraser Nelson signs off for the last time (1:30); Cindy Yu explores growing hostility in China to the Japanese (7:44); Mary Wakefield examines the dark truth behind the Pelicot case in France (13:32); Anthony Sattin reviews Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Cultures (19:54); and Toby Young reveals

Israel’s revenge, farewell Fraser & the demise of invitations

37 min listen

This week: Israel’s revenge and Iran’s humiliation. As the anniversary of the October 7th attacks by Hamas approaches, the crisis in the Middle East has only widened. Israel has sent troops into southern Lebanon and there have been attempted missile strikes from the Houthi rebels in Yemen and from Iran. Is there any way the situation

Toby Young

Did Michael Gove mean what he said?

I thought the Spectator dinner for Michael Gove hosted by Fraser Nelson would be cancelled. To be clear, this wasn’t a dinner where the Ming vase would be passed from one custodian to another, witnessed by the magazine’s general staff. Rather, this was a dinner to celebrate Michael’s legacy as education secretary organised weeks earlier

The science of voting for Kamala Harris

The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on

Help! I’ve got class envy

The summer holidays were a washout as far as my children are concerned, because we had to cancel our trip to Norway when I discovered two of their passports had expired. But in an effort to make it up to them, I managed to squeeze in a trip to Salcombe last weekend. Unfortunately, I failed

Labour’s backwards steps on free speech

Free speech advocates like me need to stop talking about the meagre gains we made under the last government because the present one seems to be listening carefully, taking notes, then gleefully reversing each one. First it torpedoed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Then it threatened to put the ‘legal but harmful’ stuff

How to exploit a crisis

The phrase ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but it’s something the left is better at than the right. Take the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a lobby group that campaigns for more online censorship run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and

I was wrong about staycations

I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged

Will Starmer make the Online Safety Act even worse?

Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian

Free speech stops riots 

With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed outbreaks of civil disorder on too much free speech, but this knee-jerk, illiberal reaction is now more likely to be found on the left. I’m not just thinking of Paul Mason, who called for Ofcom

Welcome to the new global theocracy

I had a revelation while watching the Olympics opening ceremony. It was during the infamous section that I (and almost everyone else) understood to be a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. A large woman in a halo-like headdress was flanked by various avant-garde performance artists, including three drag queens. These, presumably, were

The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir

Are the Rees-Moggs ready for their new reality?

I felt slightly anxious for Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg when I read he’d agreed to have a reality show made about his family by an American television channel. I imagine most people’s reaction on hearing this was to think: ‘Are you stark raving bonkers?’ But as someone who’s appeared in several reality shows and been followed

What Labour could learn from Australia and New Zealand

I’m just coming to the end of a four-week speaking tour Down Under and have spotted some worrying signs of what our new government might have in store for us, particularly on the free speech front. During its six years in power, the Labour party in New Zealand tried to criminalise ‘hate speech’ against minority

The joys of Canada by train

There cannot be a lazier way of travelling across Canada than in the Rocky Mountaineer. There are luxury trains, and then there’s this. For two days, I sat in a sumptuously upholstered, air-conditioned carriage, looking out at the vast wilderness of Canada’s interior, as waiters plied me with wine, chocolates and three-course meals. When imagining

The funny side of being cancelled

Douglas Is Cancelled, the new drama series on ITV, should come with a trigger warning – for me, anyway. Watching it brought back memories of my own cancellation six years ago, which I found so traumatic that I lost half a stone. Admittedly, the middle-aged white man at the centre of this drama (Hugh Bonneville)

The joy of my new allotment

I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email from the Acton Gardening Association last October telling me that a plot had become available at the Bromyard allotments. I had put my name down so long ago, I’d completely forgotten. I asked if I could come and see the plot before making up my mind,